I sighed. ‘But as we’ve seen ever since ’07, he will go charging into danger without a thought for his personal safety.’
‘Please go to him, Julie. See that he is safe.’
‘But, Carolyne…’ The Jenkins’ marriage was an old, longtangled mess, which poor Carolyne had survived with dignity and kindness. Yet I knew that Walter had never lost his tenderness for his estranged wife. As she had once remarked herself, you could read about it in his books. ‘It’s you he needs, not me.’
‘I cannot,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot.’
That was family for you. Of course I could not refuse to help – and I agreed, in fact, that Walter probably really was in danger given the shocking precedent of Mikaelian. Of course I would go to him. Even if it meant, I realised, the publisher of my own narrative of the Second War would have to wait even longer for a finished draft. I tried to make contact.
In the event I did not have long to wait before I received an invitation from Walter himself, over the signature of our old friend Eric Eden, to visit that Unreliable Narrator at the Martian pits at Amersham.
2
AFTERMATH
When Carolyne phoned, I admit, I was rather out of touch. After the Second War I had retained my anonymity, and since then I had distanced myself from the consequences, as much as one can from a world war. I had my own life, which I had resumed with some relief; I had gone back to America for a time, and then retreated to the battered sanity of a recovering Paris, and had spent the intervening decade trying to rebuild a disrupted career as a journalist, in addition to researching and compiling the early sections of this present memoir. I had been content to watch the recovery of a wounded world as if from without – a very Jenkins-like perspective.
Everything had been so different after the Second War! The Martian assault was over in a few days – and the immediate aftermath was as painful as ever, the clearing of the dead, the search for survivors all traumatised to one degree or another, the beginnings of reconstruction the unseemly scramble for scraps of Martian technology – and after that the longer-term problems had started. The Martians might be gone, but the banks were still not issuing loans, the stock exchanges were not trading, and in America as in London and Berlin even the bullion reserve was not secured. As global trade ground to a halt, after a couple of weeks the food shortages began, and the power cuts, and the water supply failures – even in cities that had never glimpsed a Martian – and soon after that the plagues. Then came the riots, and then the revolutions in Delhi, in the Ottoman provinces, even in France against the occupying Germans.
These early days of emergency, in fact, had been the inducement Mikaelian had used to call her parliament of the desperate to Basra.
Horen Mikaelian was an Armenian nun who at the time of the Second War had been in Paris, a refugee from persecution under the Ottomans. Her emergence as a key figure after the war was remarkable – as was her capacity for persuasion, which had fuelled the first tentative efforts to construct a new postMartian world order. Indeed, one of Mikaelian’s first achievements had been to broker a hasty armistice between the German and Russian empires. The fact that the two armies had cooperated in resisting the Martians at St Petersburg and elsewhere helped with that.
Then, with that achievement behind her, Mikaelian had called presidents and emperors and monarchs and ambassadors, and scientists and historians and philosophers, to gather in Basra, an ancient city at the heart of the world’s first civilisation (and from which the British occupying presence had been hastily withdrawn). At that first conference, emergency aid packages were immediately agreed, an international bank quickly set up to aid relief efforts, and longer-term infrastructure projects begun institutions that had later become the pillars of the Federation of Federations.
And, above all that, what had emerged from those first frantic days in Basra had been the vision of a federal model of government, a supremely flexible and resilient system which Mikaelian says struck her as the single most striking piece of genius about the post-Revolutionary American settlement – a system that Mikaelian had, in her own endearing words, ‘sold’ to the assembled leaders. At first Mikaelian’s ‘Federation of Federations’ was little more than a patchwork of agreements over trade and spheres of mutual interest, but at least all this ‘Turkish parley-voo’, as Churchill had wryly called it, might enable mankind to govern itself with a little more sanity than it had managed before.
Well, it seemed to be working. The institutions for which Mikaelian had argued, and which had seemed so utopian before – global transport networks, resources such as mineral rights held for the common good, international interventionist financial institutions (Keynes argued for that) – had quickly proved their worth. Even the somewhat sceptical and isolationist Americans had been glad of the new order when global aid poured in to alleviate the effects of devastating floods on the Mississippi in 1926-7, and again when the collapse of an overheated Wall Street almost caused a global recession. The invasion of China by Japan in 1931 had been another test for the Federation’s councils. The restored Chinese Emperor Puyi had argued eloquently for help; concerted international pressure caused the Japanese to abandon their adventure.
The old empires, meanwhile, were evolving towards a looser, more democratic form of federalism: relics of an age of conquest and despoliation, now mutating into agents of the peaceful coexistence of peoples. This was true even of the tottering Ottomans. And on a wider scale the idea of a kind of global unity was emerging.
Walter Jenkins had been invited to the first Basra summits. Age had not mellowed him. He wrote of the impressive celebrities he met – Gandhi for one, a representative of a newly independent India, and Ataturk, the Ottoman ambassador – but Walter’s principal memory seems to have been one of irritation that he had been largely outshone by one of his long-standing rivals: ‘You know the fellow, the Year Million man, with the alarming novels and scattershot predictions, forever falling out with some socialist or other, and the whiff of extra-marital scandal ever clinging about him, and his damn squeaky voice…’ We may have been all but prostrate at the feet of the Martians, but we humans continued our own petty wars regardless. Oddly that gives me a certain hope for the species. And I should note here that the efforts of ‘the Year Million man’ to lobby for a declaration of human rights to be the centrepiece of the new Federation’s constitution will long be remembered, with gratitude.
Meanwhile the Cythereans, our unwilling guests from Venus – those who had not been spirited away by the Martians when they withdrew – were the subject of international and interdisciplinary study, in reserves and zoos and biological institutions across the planet, a study the public followed avidly in the newspapers and newsreels. I suspect, in fact, that their very presence on the earth, their very strangeness, inspired a subliminal sense of unity in mankind. Some, indeed, said that we should be housing these visitors, not in reserves, but in their own embassy to the Federation of Federations. Such troubling questions, which strike at the heart of our understanding of what it means for us to be human, are for the future, perhaps.
As for myself, I had ventured to Basra, anonymously, for the great ceremonies on April 24 1925 when the Federation’s constitution had been signed. And I admit I came to London to celebrate the independence of Ireland and India in 1927, and the granting of the vote to women – at last! – in 1930…
But I always scuttled back to Paris. Something in me, I think, had been changed during the War. When I saw people around me, especially in anonymous masses, I could find it hard to see the spirit beyond the flesh and bone – as if they were no more than plastic receptacles of blood, to be moulded at will. A touch of the Jenkins Syndrome, you might say. In London I had found greater consolation, in fact, at the Tomb of the Vanished Warrior, before an empty coffin, than in the company of the living.